Sea Change
,
(a poetics of the liquid state)
5 Screen Digital Installation with Surround Sound and Photographic Prints. Dimensions variable.
“Place is mutable, contestable, leaky and marked with the trauma of the past. As we become unstuck and flow into one another we may find a way to create alternate possibilities, a different pathway thinking about the ethical self.”
Synopsis
In April 2010 I watched the Deepwater Horizon oil spill each night on television and was deeply disturbed.
I imagined an oil spill could happen anywhere. Our clear blue waters could be turned the sickening orange brown of crude oil.
I created this installation from these feelings and thoughts so that as you, the viewer, watch the 4 different screens of waterways turn from blue to orange you are engulfed. Over five minutes the water slowly turns murky and dark and a giant wave with a large orange blob surrounds you. The chemical formal for hydro-chloride oil fills the screen and drips into a puddle of dark oil. The room goes black and your shadow as viewer is cast on the fifth screen as a rain of everyday plastic items fills the spatial outline of your body. We are all implicated. You leave the space and walk into a gallery of photographs from the piece culminating in maps of the outline of the oil spill in New Orleans and another one with the same outline superimposed over the city in which the piece is installed. For example, if New York City were the center of the spill, the boundaries of the oil spill would stretch into Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.
